The experiment showed that many dogs will push through a door to get to their owner three times faster if the human is crying.

Lead author of the study Emily Sanford, from Johns Hopkins University, said: ‘We found dogs not only sense what their owners are feeling – if a dog knows a way to help them, they’ll go through barriers to provide help to them.

‘Every dog owner has a story about coming home from a long day, sitting down for a cry and the dog’s right there, licking their face. In a way, this is the science behind that.’

Getty ImagesDougal Waters

The study, titled Timmy’s in the well: Empathy and prosocial helping in dogs, put 34 dogs, including golden retrievers and labradors, into a room next to their owners who were trapped behind a clear door.

Nearly half of the pets pushed the door open if their owner pretended to be upset and did so in around 23 seconds, compared to an average of 96 seconds if the person was just humming a song.

Sanford said that the interesting thing about the research was ‘that the dogs would open the door significantly more quickly if the owner was crying’.

Researchers said that when the experiment was tried with therapy dogs, they did not react as fast as pet dogs.

‘It's possible that because therapy dogs are trained on obedience rather than sensitivity to human emotions, that might be why we didn't find a difference there,’ said Sanford.